OpenID IPR Policy Draft

Gabe Wachob gabe.wachob at amsoft.net
Thu Dec 7 23:33:54 UTC 2006


Actually, the language was changed from "post to a list", not "subscribe to
a list" for this very reason. 

Our intent was to come up with another simple trigger that didn't involve a
lot of process (and was clear and not subject to much interpretation) and
decided that this was a reasonable first cut (the act of posting to the
list). What other simple trigger would you suggest? How do you define
"contribution"? Who defines contribution? This is fuzzy line here - we were
trying to enclose the largest scope of contributions to minimize questions
later on whether or not an idea was "contributed" or not (e.g. a
patent-covered claim can be incorporated in a specification whether or not a
patent owner actually contributes *text*). 

This stuff is rather complicated and since we are not doing it within the
confines of a traditional standards body, we either have to take the time to
do a formal IPR policy which implies more formal process (introducing
friction to wider community participation), OR we have to have a IPR policy
that acknowledges the loose procedure we are using and recognizes the risk
of this approach with respect to IPR disclosure and licensing. There's no
free lunch here. 

The one thing I think we really should avoid is recreating a more formal
standards body from scratch - its hard work and these bodies already exist.
If this community really believes that we need the more formal process and
IPR policy, then we should consider taking this effort to a standards body
like OASIS *now* rather than later. 

I think a number of us working on this hoped that we could get this work to
an implementable state sooner than it would be practical to move to a formal
standards body. The current work on IPR policy is a stopgap measure until
such a time that we decide to take the work to a more formal standards body.
 

	-Gabe



> -----Original Message-----
> From: specs-bounces at openid.net [mailto:specs-bounces at openid.net] On Behalf
> Of Martin Atkins
> Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 10:54 AM
> To: general at openid.net; specs at openid.net
> Subject: Re: OpenID IPR Policy Draft
> 
> Recordon, David wrote:
> >
> > http://openid.net/wiki/index.php/IPR_Policy
> >
> 
> Is it really possible to use mailing list subscription as a trigger for
> a contract like this? The whole idea scares me a little bit, to be honest.
> 
> It seems more sensible to me to put these restrictions on actual
> *contributions*: require that any proposal or concrete
> specification/implementation offered via the mailing lists or other
> "official" channels to come with patent disclosure, and only *then* are
> any undisclosed patents assumed to constitute a royalty-free, perpetual
> licence.
> 
> As it is currently written, I think lots of companies that retain
> software patents of any kind - or even ones that don't but may wish to
> in the future - would be put off contributing due to the risk that their
> patents may be implicitly licenced to everyone.
> 
> I'm not a lawyer, of course. However, not everyone who could potentially
> be affected by this is a lawyer either, so putting in stuff that
> potentially scares non-lawyers like myself is probably a bad idea.
> 
> 
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